Greg DiFalco – OpenMoves Inc.http://openmoves.com
The E-Marketing PeopleMon, 14 Aug 2017 20:09:45 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.5Assisted Conversions – It’s Nice to Contribute!http://openmoves.com/blog/assisted-conversions/
http://openmoves.com/blog/assisted-conversions/#respondFri, 14 Jul 2017 11:24:46 +0000http://openmoves.com/?post_type=blog&p=11043A lead or an ecommerce order often has many contributing sources over several clicks to the website until the conversion occurs. Which should get the credit for that assisted conversion?

]]>Website analytics tracking is like basketball or hockey: A well-timed pass can lead to a basket or goal. A lead or an ecommerce order often has many contributing sources over several clicks to the website until the conversion occurs. Which should get the credit for that conversion? The last click before the conversions? The click that introduced the visitor to the site? Or those that moved the user along the conversion path? In simpler terms, assisted conversions are the interactions that a customer has with a website leading up to the conversion.

When we analyze Google Analytics data, we typically look at “last click” attribution when identifying the source of conversions to determine ROI (return on investment). This means we’re looking at the very last traffic source that occurred prior to a conversion, whether it’s a lead or an online sale. This is very important as it provides us with data relating to direct conversions that should be attributed to a channel, whether PPC, SEO, Organic or Direct.

Given the fact that we engage with a brand across multiple channels, its extremely important nowadays to identify what the contribution to conversions is for each individual traffic source. You can now have a holistic and more accurate picture of the value being generated by each traffic source!

Definitions

Let’s get some fancy definitions out of the way to help explain these concepts. According to Google Analytics:

Assisted Conversions and Assisted Conversion Value are, “the number of conversions for which this channel appeared on the conversion path, but was not the final conversion interaction.” If a channel appears anywhere—except as the final interaction—on a conversion path, it is considered an assist for that conversion. The higher these numbers, the more important the assist role of the channel.

First Click Conversions and First Click Conversion Value is a kind of assist interaction. This is the first interaction on a conversion path. The higher these numbers, the more important the channel’s role in initiating new sales (Top Funnel) and conversions.

Lookback Window is “a period of 1–90 days prior to each conversion. Only impressions and clicks within this period are credited.” 30 days are usually set as the default Lookback Window.

Top Conversion Paths are individual steps a user has taken that ultimately leads to a conversion. What was the source of the first click and subsequent clicks until a conversion occurred.

We should also point out that a conversion can be anything you have decided you want to track on your website, whether it’s a contact-us form submission, a newsletter signup, a click on a downloadable PDF, or an ecommerce transaction. When you configure non-ecommerce conversions, you can assign a value to the conversion. Hypothetically, you can assign a $100 value to each newsletter subscription conversion because you might know for a fact that that is the 12-month average value of that signup. Conversely, ecommerce transactions are automatically configured to track the order value. Thus, when identifying “Conversion Value,” Google Analytics will either report the combined value of the non-ecommerce conversions or the commerce revenue (or both).

Measuring Assisted Conversions & Value

In Google Analytics, it is very easy to identify the assisted results by traffic source. It starts with accessing the Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions screen (see Fig. 1). In here, you can select which types of conversions you want to report on (see Fig. 2)

Figure 2: In Google Analytics, when you want to see what the assisted conversion activity is by source, you have the option to pick and choose which types of conversions to display. For example, you can choose to only look at assisted conversions for ecommerce orders, where the conversion value equals the revenue. Conversely, you can look only at 1 or more individual Goals, where the value is an arbitrary amount you have configured.

Once you’ve chosen which conversions you want to show for this report, you can then display the assisted results by individual traffic channel (see Fig. 3).

Figure 3: This chart summarizes the assisted conversions and value assigned to each traffic source over a one-month period. It indicates, for example, that Paid Search contributed to 5,385 additional conversions and ~$57K worth of additional revenue.

Figure 4: This chart summarizes the assisted First Click conversions assigned to each traffic source. It indicates, for example, that social media contributed to 897 additional conversions and ~$15K revenue by being the first to introduce the visitor to the site.

Top Conversion Paths

Related to the discussion about assisted conversions is the concept of conversion paths. As mentioned earlier, this refers to a user’s path leading up to a conversion on your website. See Fig. 5 for an outline of some specific conversion paths.

Figure 5: Top Conversion Paths reflect individual steps a user has taken that ultimately leads to a conversion. In this example, Paid Search, for example, occurs in 4 of the top 8 top conversion paths that ultimately lead to orders, contributing to a considerable number of total conversions.

Making Smart Marketing Decisions

Armed with a more holistic picture of conversion results by traffic source, you are now capable of making smarter decisions regarding where to put content efforts, paid marketing dollars, and specific offers or promotions.

If you would like us to audit your site and see how we can improve your performance, please give us a holler.

A Note About Calculations

Assisted Conversions for a given channel counts all conversions in which that channel was a non-last interaction. Assisted Conversion Value is the total value associated with those conversions. As as result, double-counting can occur across rows or across assisted and last conversions. If two conversions occur for a single person, any channel interactions which were in both conversion paths count toward both conversions.

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/assisted-conversions/feed/0Google AdWords & Bing Ads – Forever Linked!http://openmoves.com/blog/google-adwords-bing-ads-forever-linked/
http://openmoves.com/blog/google-adwords-bing-ads-forever-linked/#respondFri, 10 Feb 2017 14:21:13 +0000http://openmoves.com/?post_type=blog&p=9719Bing Ads just announced a new tool called Automated Imports. It was already possible to import Google AdWords campaigns into Bing, but this new tool can automate the process.

]]>You are preparing to launch pay-per-click advertising ads in Google and Bing. You have decided on a total advertising budget. Now, how do you divide the budget between the two? You may find that trial and error is the only way to identify the optimal budget allocations. You’ll also find out quickly which account consumes a majority of your time managing it.

But take it from a seasoned professional: Google AdWords usually outperforms Bing Ads with a lower cost per click, higher conversion rate, more conversions, etc. Thus, you’ll find that most of your management time is spent in Google AdWords.

Luckily, Bing Ads just announced a new tool called Automated Imports. It was already possible to import Google AdWords campaigns into Bing, but this new tool can automate the process. It is customizable based on such factors as:

Removal of similar Bing Ads campaigns so that they can be replaced by imported Google campaigns

Frequency of import

See Fig. 1 for a screenshot of typical Import settings you could configure.

Figure 1: These settings allow you tocustomize what you tell Bing Ads to automatically import from Google AdWords, including the frequency of the import, what, specifically, you import, and what you tell Bing to turn off.

Why Mirror Google Campaigns in Bing?

Although use of this tool isn’t always recommended (for example, when already established Bing Ads campaigns already produce a good return on investment), it is worthwhile in most instances where you are running paid advertising campaigns on both platforms. Google has so many more features than Bing Ads, including, for example, the ability to run static and dynamic remarketing ads. So, it is often more important to optimize campaigns in Google than Bing, especially since you’ll probably be spending more money in Google.

Therefore, the ability to duplicate the changes made in Google directly into Bing can not only be a time-saver, but can also help boost ROI and ROAS!

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/google-adwords-bing-ads-forever-linked/feed/0Pay-Per-Click Keyword Types – A Beginner’s Guidehttp://openmoves.com/blog/pay-per-click-keyword-types-beginners-guide/
http://openmoves.com/blog/pay-per-click-keyword-types-beginners-guide/#respondTue, 20 Sep 2016 15:36:04 +0000http://openmoves.com/?post_type=blog&p=8662Launching a new Pay-Per-Click advertising account on Google AdWords (or Bing) is fraught with peril, if only because of the sheer multitude of keyword matching options. A common beginner’s mistake is to launch a campaign with a slew of broad …

]]>Launching a new Pay-Per-Click advertising account on Google AdWords (or Bing) is fraught with peril, if only because of the sheer multitude of keyword matching options. A common beginner’s mistake is to launch a campaign with a slew of broad terms that represent your product or service. While this broad-based approach might seem like an appealing way to maximize your presence in Google Search, it can end up being a very costly experience, and one which might discourage you from ever running paid ads again!

Google AdWords has 5 keyword match types, ranging from an “exact match” approach to a “broad” one, that I’ll discuss in this post. A smart and effective PPC strategy uses 1 or more of these match types to drive clicks, leads, and orders.

Exact Match

Exact Match keywords are simply that: your ads will trigger for only the exact variation of the term. These keywords are implemented with brackets surrounding them, and yield no variations whatsoever. Usage of these terms is especially valuable when a term is either a) extremely expensive on a cost per click basis, or b) when a term is particularly voluminous in terms of search volume, and can lead to an exhaustion of your daily budget were you to use a Broad or Phrase Match type for it.

Usage of this match type could be useful, for example, if you wanted to show your ad for a very high volume term such as “non profit.” This is a very broad topic and can refer to specific companies, people simply looking for how to launch a non-profit, people looking to fundraise for their non-profit, or any of a dozen additional things. Therefore, targeting the Exact Match phrase “non-profits” can be a way to bring your ad good exposure, yet limit your ad from showing for potentially irrelevant variations.

Broad Match

Broad Match keywords are specified “as is,” with no formatting or structural inclusions. PPC ads will show on searches that include misspellings, synonyms, related searches, and other relevant variations of the broad match phrase you target (see Fig.1).

Figure 1: These Broad Match search phrases will trigger your PPC ads for a wide range of variations. For example, a search for “power tools suppliers in New York” will trigger your ad if you have specified “power tools” as a Broad Match keyword in your campaign.

It’s important to realize that targeting a broad keyword term or phrase will trigger your ads to show for many, many variations of that phrase (see Fig. 2).

Figure 2: This is an example of Broad Match keyword, triggering our ad for the keyword, “non-profit fundraising.”

It’s a very common mistake to create an AdWords campaign and fill it with broad terms in the hopes that your ads will reach a wide audience. But when you dig deeper, you will often find many undesirable, irrelevant variations that ended up triggering your ad (see Fig. 3).

Figure 3: This list of terms includes keywords that triggered our ads because of our use of the Broad Match keyword phrase, “talking watches for the blind.” As you can see, there were several good variations that triggered our ads, but a few undesirable ones, as well. The danger of using Broad Match is the irrelevant variations it could yield.

Broad Match Modifier

Basically, the only difference between Broad Match and Broad Match Modifier (BMM) is that your BMM keyword will contain a “+” symbol and your ad won’t get triggered for synonyms. This can limit the additional variations that trigger your ads, helping to keep down your costs, while limiting potential irrelevancy (see Fig. 4).

Figure 4: In this example, the Broad Match Modifier keyword is +snow +joe and it triggers these variations. You will see that the variations that triggered our ads are a little tighter and limited irrelevancy.

Phrase Match

Phrase Match keywords contain quotes and trigger ads when that exact phrase and/or a close variation is searched. This is a further way to reduce cost and irrelevancy. Whereas Broad Match and Broad Match Modifiers aim to maximize your exposure for a phrase, Phrase Match aims to narrow the reach by making sure your ad is triggered for a much more specific set of variations (see Fig. 5).

Figure 5: This list of terms includes variations of the Phrase Match keyword, “fire pits.” As you can see, the variations that trigger the ads each have some very close variation of “fire pits,” helping to reduce irrelevancy.

A balanced approach to keyword targeting should include a heavy dose of Phrase Match keyword usage.

Negative Match

This final keyword matching type is especially important for campaigns that include Broad Match, Broad Match Modifier, and Phrase Match keyword variations. By specifying a negative keyword, you are telling Google not to show your ads if a particular word or phrase is included within a user’s search phrase.

The best approach to take when it comes to negative terms is to specify a list of very general terms that you are comfortable applying account-wide. For example:

Free

Job

Jobs

Career

How-to

Diy

Do it yourself

This ensures that even if you are using a Phrase or Broad Match keyword, that your ad won’t trigger if 1 of these words is included in the user’s search.

Secondly, applying more specific negative keywords on a campaign by campaign basis can make sure that you limit exposure on undesirable terms in 1 area of your account, but not account-wide. An example would be if you want to make sure a keyword phrase that includes “hands-free” appears for 1 group of keywords, but not another, specify “free” as a negative keyword only in the campaign where there are non hands-free products.

]]>Facebook pay-per-click advertising is becoming more mainstream and effective as more brands leverage the platform to increase awareness, leads, and sales. The Facebook Ads platform — revamped to mirror other paid advertising platforms — offers several ad units and targeting options that can expand your online advertising reach. While conversion tracking remains weaker than traditional PPC advertising such as Google AdWords, the various ways to reach prospects and engage with customers are very robust.

Choosing a Facebook Advertising Objective

When launching a new ad campaign in Facebook, you are first taken to a screen (see Figure 1) which outlines the various objectives, categorized by a general objective, and followed by a more specific objective that will determine the ad units that you can use.

Figure 1: When setting up a new ad campaign in Facebook, the options provided are based on different objectives you may have for launching a campaign.

Awareness – This set of ad options is intended to drive brand awareness for your business, and includes the ability to promote an event, boost individual posts you make on your company page, or simply promote your company page to the targeted audience you choose. It is useful for such things as:

Promoting your non-profit fundraising event

Promoting your company to customers who live or are otherwise nearby your storefront

Reaching people more likely to pay attention to your ads and increase awareness for your brand

Connecting more people with your company page

Consideration – This set of ad options is geared towards identifying and targeting potential customers for your business or organization, and it allows you to:

Timely coupons, discounts or other deals for people to claim in your store (online or off)

Ads that get people to take valuable actions on your website, such as signing up for a demo or making a purchase

Ads that get more people to use your Facebook or mobile app

Facebook Targeting Options

Facebook allows you to target any type of audience you want, and the options range from very broad to very specific. For example, let’s say you already have an audience of people you want your ads to reach. You can either upload a list of existing customers exported from your system, which Facebook will match to corresponding users, or you can create lists based on people who engage with your website or Facebook page content (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Facebook lets you create an audience who will see your ads. You can either upload a list of email addresses, which Facebook will match with corresponding user accounts, create a list of people who you know visit your website, create a list of your app users, or generate a list of people Facebook knows have engaged with your page’s content.

Conversely, let’s say you do not have an audience of potential customers, but want to let Facebook find one for you. The criteria with which you can create an audience include:

Location

Age

Gender

Language

Demographics

Interest

Behavior

Excluded Behaviors

In this way, you can narrow your reach by both incorporating known criteria and/or excluding certain types of people who may not match your standard customer profile (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: When creating a new audience, you are given several options to narrow down the criteria by which your ads reach a potential audience, including targeting by location, age, gender, etc.

Sample Facebook Ads

Chances are, if you browse Facebook on a regular basis, you will have encountered one of the various ad units that advertisers have at their disposal. This is because your personal settings help Facebook populate advertiser’s potential audiences.

Figure 4: Above, see an example of a standard ad unit – 1200×628 – promoting a message (or product), and including expanded messaging atop the image, as well as a coupon code and call to action button below. The ad to the right is a “carousel” ad, which cycles various pictures, allowing users to scroll through potential offers. Both appear in user’s Newsfeeds.

Figure 5: This ad appears in the right side panel of Facebook.

Figure 6: This ad appears on Instagram, which is one of the syndication options when launching a campaign on Facebook.

Figure 7: This is a promoted video ad, appearing in a user’s newsfeed.

Conversion Tracking

Unfortunately, conversion tracking on Facebook lags behind the accuracy of pay-per-click platforms such as Google AdWords. So, while user engagement of your ads that occurs on Facebook itself is very accurate, user actions taken on your website will simply be less than accurate for a variety of reasons. For one, people who see your ads on Facebook, but don’t click them, then go on to your website via other means, cannot be tracked by the Facebook pixel. Therefore, your ad would not get “credit” for contributing to the lead or purchase.

OpenMoves has a proprietary method for more accurately monitoring conversion actions taken on your website. Contact us for help launching paid advertising campaigns on Facebook.

A Few Valuable Facebook Statistics

Worldwide, there are over 1.65 billion monthly active Facebook users (MAUs) which is a 15% increase year over year. (Source: Facebook as of 4/27/16) – This means that whether you are a B2B or B2C business, Facebook is too big to ignore! 1.09 billion people log onto Facebook daily (3/16), which represents a 16% increase year over year (Source: Facebook as 4/27/16) – Facebook is not a fad and your clients and prospects are on it daily.

On average, Like and Share Buttons are viewed across almost 10 million websites daily. (Source: Facebook as of 10/2/2014)

Facebook users are 76% female and 66% male.

Average time spent per Facebook visit is 20 minutes. Make your impression with relevant and interesting information.

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/are-facebook-ads-for-you/feed/0Google Shopping Campaign Optimizationhttp://openmoves.com/blog/google-shopping-campaign-optimization/
http://openmoves.com/blog/google-shopping-campaign-optimization/#respondTue, 26 Apr 2016 23:03:53 +0000http://openmoves.com/?post_type=blog&p=8376In an earlier post I talked about ways to improve the performance of your Google Shopping campaign by applying segmentation options. You should not bid the same price for every item in your Google Merchant Center feed file because not …

]]>In an earlier post I talked about ways to improve the performance of your Google Shopping campaign by applying segmentation options. You should not bid the same price for every item in your Google Merchant Center feed file because not all products are created equal in terms of ROI. With that in mind, here are additional ways to boost performance of your Shopping campaigns.

Using the Dimensions Report to Identify Feed Segmentation Options

This option is still the primary way to improve performance. It was true then. It’s true now. Use the Dimensions report in Google AdWords to segment results by Google category, product type (your internal category), brand, item ID, and more, so that you can determine which products or categories perform better than others (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

Figure 1: The Dimensions > Shopping > Item ID report summarizes the results of your Google Shopping campaign by drilling down all the way to the individual item, or SKU. This can help you determine how to segment your feed.

Create Multiple Campaigns

Here’s what’s new to this process: Split your shopping campaign into two or three campaigns so that you can use them to target different objectives. In addition to a regular shopping campaign with regular bidding settings, no segmentation, and no special formatting, create 2 additional campaigns.

Dynamic Bids – The first new campaign should only bid on items you have decided to segment. These are items that yield a higher conversion rate, better ROI, or don’t have inventory issues. They’re your top-sellers, in other words. This new “dynamic bids” campaign should specify much higher bids for these items so that you can absolutely maximize their exposure and, therefore, their performance.

Penny Bids – The second new campaign should be a complete duplicate of your main campaign, containing all items with no special changes to the settings. However, the bids for all items should be set at 1 cent each. You might notice that unless you set an extremely high daily budget for your campaigns, you’ll often see a “limited by budget” message (see Figure 2). This means that your ads technically go offline for a portion of the day, while Google tries to evenly distribute your daily budget throughout the day. The penny bids campaign will help maximize the exposure of your products by counteracting Google’s need to take your ads offline. At 1 cent each, it’s difficult for Google to report a limited by budget message!

Figure 2

Figure 2: The dreaded “Limited by budget” message next to one of your campaigns means Google thinks you could be spending a lot more money on it. But that doesn’t mean you necessarily need to raise it!

Bidding Offsets by Device, Demographic, or Time

This is the final way to significantly boost performance of your Shopping campaigns. So far, we’ve identified products or categories to segment based on performance. Then, we created additional Shopping campaigns to call out the top-performers and counteracted Google’s need to take us offline during certain periods of the day by creating a penny bids campaign. Now, we can apply 1 final enhancement to the campaigns. Changing the bids by device, demographic or time period will allow us to further maximize performance of our Shopping campaigns by lowering what we spend on devices and in areas of the country where we have not seen good historical results.

Bid Offsets by Device – This simply means that we can change our bids for people using desktops or mobile devices. Using an AdWords’ Segment, you can identify the results of a campaign by device. Often, the results will be quite disparate (see Figure 3). You will therefore have the necessary data to identify what bid changes to make based on the device being used to click your ads.

Figure 3

Figure 3: Using an AdWords Segment, you can review results by device and use the knowledge to raise or lower bids for your Shopping campaign, depending on the device that is being used to find your ads.

Bid Offsets by Demographic – Take the bid reductions or increases to the next logical step and change them based on demographic information such as country, region, or state (see Figure 4).

Figure 4

Figure 4: Using an AdWords Segment, you can review results by location and use the knowledge to raise or lower bids for your Shopping campaign.

Bid Offsets by Time – Go even further by changing your bids based on time-based information such as Day of Week or Hour of Day (see Figure 5).

Figure 5

Figure 5: Using an AdWords Segment, you can review results by Hour of the Day and use the knowledge to raise or lower bids for your Shopping campaign.

Summary

For many ecommerce sites, Google AdWords Pay-Per-Click accounts often include a heavy dose of Google Shopping ads. So, maximizing performance in these campaigns can significantly impact the results. Consider these performance boosters to help take your account performance to the next level.

If you need help with your PPC campaigns give us a holler. Also, take a look at some free audit tools to see how your site ranks for SEO as well as Local Presence.

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/google-shopping-campaign-optimization/feed/0Leverage 7 NEW Google Ad Extensionshttp://openmoves.com/blog/leverage-7-new-google-ad-extensions/
http://openmoves.com/blog/leverage-7-new-google-ad-extensions/#respondMon, 22 Feb 2016 21:30:19 +0000http://openmoves.com/?post_type=blog&p=8251Here are some important Pay-Per-Click ad extensions you can use in your Google AdWords account. These will help improve the look and feel of your ads, provide a clearer message, improve click through, and help convert customers more effectively. Perhaps as …

]]>Here are some important Pay-Per-Click ad extensions you can use in your Google AdWords account. These will help improve the look and feel of your ads, provide a clearer message, improve click through, and help convert customers more effectively. Perhaps as importantly, they also expand the real estate your paid ad takes up, pushing down other advertisers’ ads!

Here’s the list of available new ad extensions in Google AdWords that you can use to bolster the performance of your advertising account:

Review Extensions (New!)

This extension lets you add positive write-ups, awards, or third-party rankings about your company in an additional line of text beneath your search ads on desktops and tablet devices. See Figure 5.

Figure 5: A review extension can improve clickthrough rates on your ads because it lets you display a positive review your company recently received.

Callout Extensions (New!)

This new extension is useful because it lets you display bullet point items that describe your company, product or service. For example, let’s say you offer free shipping and a price match guarantee. You can display these items in your search ad as further promotion of your product or service. See Figure 6 for an example of several callout items you might consider if you had an ecommerce store.

Figure 6: examples of several possible callout extensions you can use if you have an ecommerce store.

Structured Snippet Extensions (New!)

This new extension lets you provide “categorized” callouts to your ads. So, while Callout Extensions let you display bullet point tidbits of random information you want to promote, Structured Snippets allow these to be categorized using one of several different options:

Amenities

Brands

Courses

Degree Programs

Destinations

Featured Hotels

Insurance Coverage

Models

Neighborhoods

Service Catalog

Shows

Styles

Types

So, a hotel chain could promote specific hotels using the Featured Hotels option. A car dealer could use the “Styles” option to list specific car models they’re selling. Many different types of industries are covered with this extension. See Figure 7 for an example of Structured Snippets in action.

Figure 7: An online education institution would use the Courses option to display several available courses available to prospective students.

Location Extensions

The oldest of all these extensions, this is still going strong! You can display your company address beneath your ad, as long as you’ve created a “Google My Business” listing. See Figure 1.

Figure 1: example of a location extension in use.

Call Extensions

This extension lets you display a phone number within your ad. You can choose to display your company’s actual phone number, or use a Google forwarding number which allows you to track call details (see Figure 2). In Figure 1 above, you can see the phone number under the ad’s headline.

Figure 2: This extension, when using the forwarding number, allows you to monitor call results by time, duration, and area code, giving you additional conversion metrics for your ads.

Sitelinks Extensions

This extension allows you to display secondary links in your search ads. Whereas the ad’s primary destination URL might be a specific landing page on your website, sitelinks can be used to extend the real estate of your ad with additional links to other pages of your site. For example, you might use this to link to a deals page, a newsletter signup form, or a contact request page. Or, you might want to display individual product or service page links here as a way to display your company’s coverage of a particular product category or service area. See Figure 3.

Several extensions were deprecated in 2015 such as the Offer Extensions and Social Extensions.

You can now include a link to your company’s Google+ page through other means, rather than within AdWords as an ad extension

The above extension can enhance the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns and should be leveraged based on your goals. If you have any questions or need help setting you your PPC campaigns please give us a holler and we’ll be happy to help.

Would you like to advertise to your email subscribers even if they did not open an email or visit your site? Or how about showing your email subscribers unique banner or text ads that are not seen by anyone else? With Google’s new Customer Match offering, advertisers can now take their list of opted-in email addresses and import them into Google AdWords, allowing advertisers to show ads to these specific customers when they perform keyword searches on Google or YouTube.

You may be asking how this is different than Remarketing, which we’ve previous written about. PPC Remarketing refers to establishing a list of users who previously visited your site, then showing them either banner or text ads as they browse Google or its affiliated sites. These users could be segmented by certain criteria, such as:

All Users

New Users

Returning Users

Users who visited a specific section of site

Users who completed a transaction

By comparison, Customer Match take the Remarketing concept to a new level. Instead of separating previous visitors into separate categories, or “buckets,” as per the list above, you can now target your opted-in email marketing subscribers and show them specific and relevant ads. These matched users will see your search ads only when they are logged into Google Search, YouTube, or Gmail.

Format and Upload List into Google AdWords

OK, so you see the value in testing this new Customer Match email audience campaign and you are ready to test it. Here are the mechanics:

Figure 1: This chart from Google AdWords outlines the basic structure of this new campaign. Note: The emails you upload will only be used to match to Google IDs. It won’t be shared with anyone and Google will delete it 7 days after matching is complete.

In between steps 1 and 2 is where the “magic” comes into play. Google takes your list of email addresses and combs through it to match individual emails with linked Google accounts. So, for example, every single Gmail address is, by default, accepted. Additionally, other non-Gmail addresses that have been established as Google logins are also targeted. This usually translates into roughly 40-50% of the original list. These users then become eligible to see your ads when they perform keyword searches.

OK, I Created the List. Now What?

Now that you have a list of matched customers, you can create a search campaign with keyword phrases that will trigger your ads when these specific customers search Google. If the light bulb is going on over your head, that’s because this presents excellent marketing opportunities! For example, you can:

Promote generic messaging about your company to these customers.

Create a custom offer that you only promote to these customers, including a free gift, a percentage discount, a buy one, get one offer, etc.

Promote new product or service offerings.

Upsell existing customers additional services or new add-on products.

Figure 1: This sample ad promotes a 5% coupon code, which will only be seen by the matched customer list uploaded to Google. In this manner, you can entice users to come back to your site and make a purchase with the coupon code. You could, of course, be more targeted with your offer by promoting a coupon on specific products, or testing different promotional offers.

Tracking Performance

Now that the campaign has been launched, you can track performance in 2 ways. First, in AdWords, you can monitor how many conversions your campaign produces, including direct web orders or leads and phone calls made from your ad (if you include a Google forwarding number). Second, you can monitor your shopping cart admin to identify how often the coupon code has been redeemed.

The best part about this campaign is that you already know the list of customers is of high value because these customers made previous purchases. So, when you combine this activity with other efforts, including remarketing and dynamic remarketing in AdWords, email blasts, and social media efforts, you can really maximize business from existing customers.

OpenMoves manages several custom email campaigns in Google AdWords for our clients. We invite you to contact us about this service if you prefer not to have “do it yourself!”

]]>Did you ever watch a YouTube video and get a “pre-roll” ad appear before the video starts? Or have you ever seen a little clickable call to action button appear as an ad is playing? Has a promoted video ad appeared in the YouTube search results or above the right-hand list of related videos?

These are all features of Google AdWords Video campaigns, which let you promote your YouTube videos to maximize reach and exposure. Promoting individual videos can be a powerful way to get your product or service-related video content seen. And since you control where and how the video is promoted, the possibilities are endless!

Connecting Google AdWords & YouTube Accounts

Before you can start promoting videos, you will need to connect your Google AdWords and YouTube accounts. Preferably, you would do this by logging in to AdWords via the login used to create both accounts. If the 2 logins are not identical, then you need to “grant” access to the YouTube account to the same email address used to access AdWords.

Figure 1: In your YouTube account, you will need to “connect” your Channel to your Google AdWords advertising account so that you can begin promoting individual videos.

First, in AdWords, go to the gear icon at the top right and click “Linked Accounts.” On the left, click YouTube and connect your YouTube company “Channel” page to your AdWords account.

In YouTube, under Channel settings, click “Advanced” under Channel and you can update the settings to connect your page to AdWords.

Creating Video Campaigns

Once the link has been established between your AdWords and YouTube accounts, you can begin establishing video advertising campaigns in AdWords. You can initiate this by accessing your All Campaigns view in AdWords and clicking the red “+ Campaign” button. From here, you will choose Video and proceed to the video campaign creation page.

Figure 2: You would create a new video promotion campaign in Google AdWords from the same location where you would create a regular Search campaign.

On the following screen, you can choose various campaign options, including budget, targeting regions, etc. Once this is established, you are free to proceed to choosing the actual video from your YouTube Channel that you’d like to start promoting.

Video Promotion Options

There are 2 distinct types of advertising options for a video: In-Stream and In-Display. These are the explanations of each, according to Google:

Your in-stream video ad plays before another video on either the YouTube Videos or Google Display Network, depending on network settings. Viewers can choose to skip your ad after a few seconds. You pay when a viewer watches 30 seconds of your video (or the duration if it’s shorter than 30 seconds) or engages with your video, whichever comes first.

Your in-display video ad includes an image and some text. This ad will show differently, depending on the website or where on YouTube it appears. You pay only when someone clicks your ad to watch your video.

Choosing one or more of these options can expand your reach dramatically, but you must consider that usage of all of the available features will require a larger daily budget. The more features you use, the less effective the overall campaign is if it has to be spread out over so many individual advertising areas.

Figure 3: This is an example of an “in-display overlay” which shows a clickable call-to-action ad on top of your video as it plays. This can be a powerful way to get your viewer to take an action, rather than to simply watch the video passively.

Figure 4: This is an example of an “in-display search result” ad which shows your ad at the top of a user’s video search results page. By utilizing this component, you can get your video in front of users searching for what you offer.

Measuring Performance

AdWords video campaigns provide extensive metrics for tracking performance. This includes the following:

Views: the number of times your video ad was viewed.

Avg. CPV: the average cost per view of your video ad.

Total Cost: the amount of money you spent on the video ad.

Clicks: the number of clicks your video got – especially relevant if you utilize the “in-display overlay” feature to let users click right to the appropriate page on your website.

Conversions: the number of conversions (web leads or ecommerce orders) your video yielded.

View-Through Conversions: the number of times your video was viewed prior to a conversion occurring, though the video itself was not clicked.

Therefore, running video campaigns ends up being much like running regular search campaigns. You establish budgets, test different creative, and measure performance to decide how to allocate your budget moving forward.

OpenMoves manages several video campaigns in Google AdWords for our clients. We invite you to contact us about this service if you prefer not to have “do it yourself!”

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/how-to-promote-youtube-videos-in-google-adwords/feed/0How To Boost Google Shopping Performancehttp://openmoves.com/blog/boost-google-shopping-performance-with-segmentation/
http://openmoves.com/blog/boost-google-shopping-performance-with-segmentation/#respondTue, 21 Jul 2015 11:30:13 +0000http://openmoves.com/?post_type=blog&p=7819Google Shopping has evolved so much over the years. It used to be called Google Base, and you didn’t need to pay to get your website’s product feed to show on Google. But, as of 2014, submitting a product feed …

]]>Google Shopping has evolved so much over the years. It used to be called Google Base, and you didn’t need to pay to get your website’s product feed to show on Google. But, as of 2014, submitting a product feed to Google Merchant Center is now only half of the way to getting your listings to show in Google Shopping. You have to establish a Shopping campaign in Google AdWords and pay every time someone clicks on one of your items!

But let’s assume all of this is old news to you. You’ve established a shopping feed in Google Merchant Center and launched a Shopping campaign in Google AdWords. How can you maximize performance?

Using the Dimensions Report to Identify Feed Segmentation Options

Although the Dimensions report is available for all Google AdWords campaigns, it is especially effective as a tool for measuring the performance of the shopping feed. You can use it to segment results by Google category, product type (your internal category), brand, item ID, and more. For example, let’s say you want to identify which items are generating the best results. Using the Dimensions > Shopping > Item ID report, you can sumarize results by item ID (or SKU) (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: The Dimensions > Shopping > Item ID report summarizes the results of your Google Shopping campaign by drilling down all the way to the individual item, or SKU. This can help you determine how to segment your feed.

How to Segment Your Shopping Campaign

OK, so, using the Dimensions > Shopping > Item ID or Dimensions > Shopping > Category reports, you can now make a determination as to how to segment your Shopping campaign to maximize performance. Instead of the campaign basically containing one adgroup (and 1 cost per click bid) for all products, you can raise or lower the bids and separate products based on performance. Here’s why this is useful: undoubtedly, there will be some items, or groups of items, that do not perform well in Google Shopping. As such, it doesn’t make sense to specify the same maximum cost per click bid for every item. In other words, you shouldn’t treat all items the same.

Segment by Item ID: You can simply call out individual items and provide a higher or lower maximum cost per click bid, based on whether the item has performed well or not. If an item has under-performed, you could specify a maximum cost per click bid of 50% of the overall bid you’ve specified for all items. You could even reduce its bid to 0 to remove the item from being promoted (or, alternatively, you could simply remove that item from the feed you submit to Google Merchant Center). By doing this, you can now call out the item’s performance by comparing it to the results of “everything else,” or Google’s label for the rest of the items for which you did not provide segmented bidding.

Segment by Category: Using this segmentation model, you can utilize the categories you’ve assigned to your products as a way to create additional “product groups” in your Shopping campaign. These product groups can have custom bids based on performance, ROI, etc., of the items contained within each category. See Figure 3.

Figure 3: Creating product groups is a way to segment your Shopping campaign by grouping similar products and modifying the maximum cost per click bids for each one to be a different value than “everything else,” or those items you have not segmented. In this way, you can identify performance by product category and adjust your bidding and budget based on the results.

Why Segment?

Very simply, not all products in your Google Shopping feed are created equal. In fact, the larger your list of items/SKUs, the more variety in performance you are likely to see. Therefore, by segmenting your items into product groups based on data you’ve reviewed in the Dimensions report, you can analyze product perfomance more effectively and improve the ROI of your Shopping campaign.

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/boost-google-shopping-performance-with-segmentation/feed/0Creating Segmented Remarketing Lists – Fun with Lists!http://openmoves.com/blog/creating-segmented-remarketing-lists-fun-with-lists/
http://openmoves.com/blog/creating-segmented-remarketing-lists-fun-with-lists/#respondTue, 26 May 2015 12:59:21 +0000http://openmoves.com/?post_type=blog&p=7707Last time, we told you about “Reaching Similar Audiences with Remarketing” in Google AdWords. This enables you to find people who share characteristics with your site visitors. By adding “similar audiences” to your remarketing campaign, you can show your ads …

]]>Last time, we told you about “Reaching Similar Audiences with Remarketing” in Google AdWords. This enables you to find people who share characteristics with your site visitors. By adding “similar audiences” to your remarketing campaign, you can show your ads to people whose interests are similar to those of your site visitors, allowing you to reach new and qualified potential customers.

Similar Audiences is the best way to grow your Remarketing campaign by leaps and bounds because it expands your remarketing audience by a factor of at least 3. But another feature of Google’s remarketing functionality can take your campaigns in a different direction. Instead of expanding the reach, you can narrow the reach based on specific criteria. This is called segmentation.

How Do I Get Started With Remarketing Segmentation?

You need to have a Google AdWords account. For the purpose of this article, we assume you have have AdWords and a Google Analytics account to measure traffic on your site. You don’t need to have Analytics to run remarketing ads on Google. But the segmentation features we’ll discuss below are all accessible there.

You will also need to update your Google Analytics code snippet. This new line of code gives Google demographic data that is necessary to allow you to initiate remarketing campaigns:

Once these steps are taken, determine how you want to segment your remarketing audience or list, what offers you’d like to promote, and how you want to deploy the remarketing campaign in Google AdWords.

Remarketing Segmentation Options

There are several ways to segment your remarketing audience (see Figure 1). Here’s a summary:

All Users – this is a basic list containing every single user who visited your website. Once a user visits your site, they get added to an audience or list, and they become eligible to be remarketed to.

Smart List – this list is based on historical conversion data from businesses like yours. Google will project which users are most likely to convert during later sessions. It is similar to the Similar Audiences feature we discussed above in that the users in this list have not been to your website before.

New Users – this list targets users who have never visited your site before the most recent time they visited. It’s a segmentation option created to let you capitalize on “fresh meat,” so to speak!

Returning Users – this list targets users who have visited your site already. You could use this to re-engage with users who are already familiar with your product or services.

Users who visited a specific section of my site – this list lets you set criteria by which to segment your audience. For example, you could create one list of visitors to your blog, and another of people who visited your main product or service page. You could then create remarketing offers specific to these 2 lists.

Users who completed a goal conversion – this segmentation option let’s you create a list of users who submitted a contact request form or downloaded a whitepaper. This is a high value list because these users took an action on your site. Thus, you can create a specific remarketing message to these users.

Users who completed a transaction – like the previous list, this one allows you to segment those who made a purchase on your website. This is an extremely high value list. To these users, you could promote additional offers such as replacement parts, service contracts, etc. Since these users made a purchase, you can remaketing a specific offer to them as a way to get them to purchase again.

Figure 1: This screen shows you which options you have when initiating the creation of a remarketing audience (or list of users). You can simply create a list containing every single users who visited your site, or you can use segmentation to create separate list, depending on your objectives.

Conclusion

It could be valuable to expand your remarketing activities and branding opportunities significantly through the use of Similar Audiences. And it can also be extremely valuable to segment your users into smaller, categorized lists that will let you promote customized messages and offers.

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/creating-segmented-remarketing-lists-fun-with-lists/feed/0Reaching “Similar Audiences” with Remarketinghttp://openmoves.com/blog/reaching-similar-audiences-with-remarketing/
http://openmoves.com/blog/reaching-similar-audiences-with-remarketing/#respondThu, 26 Mar 2015 17:22:28 +0000http://openmoves.com/?post_type=blog&p=7508If you want to take remarketing to the next level, you need to try targeting Google’s “Similar Audiences.” This will open up a whole new world of potential customers for your website!

]]>If you’ve ever set up a remarketing campaign in Google AdWords, you know how valuable a part of your advertising budget this can be. Since remarketing lets you show banner (and text) ads to users who looked at your site, it’s a way to reclaim these visitors as potential customers. Or, it’s a simple way to get these visitors to come back to your site so you can promote a new product or feature you’ve added.

But if you want to take this concept to the next level, you need to try targeting Google’s “Similar Audiences.” This will open up a whole new world of potential customers for your website!

Remarketing is good for other reasons, too. Besides getting previous visitors to click back to your site, it’s a great way to stay top-of-mind with these visitors. Your banner ads will “follow” them as they go from site to site, provided each site displays Google ads. As an example, I regularly browse one of my favorite Fantasy Baseball sites, RotoWorld. With the baseball season approaching, I access it every day. As such, I will always see one of my various clients’ remarketing banner ads displayed prominently there. Since these banners often promote an offer or new product or service, it reminds me about that site every time I refresh the page.

So, remarketing offers exciting possibilities. And the ability to reach even more of these types of visitors can be equally exciting, and profitable, too!

What are Similar Audiences?

Google’s Similar Audiences enables you to find people who share characteristics with your site visitors. By adding “similar audiences” to your ad group, you can show your ads to people whose interests are similar to those of your site visitors, allowing you to reach new and qualified potential customers.

Where Do Similar Audiences See My Ads?

Like targeting regular remarketing users, Similar Audiences can see your ads in a variety of places:

Mobile apps

Google Play

Related blogs or forums

Related websites

Gmail

YouTube

The good news is that Google lets you completely customize where your ads are seen by these similar audiences (see Figure 1). For example, you can choose to completely exclude mobile apps from showing your ads. Or, you can block ads from showing only on mobile gaming apps, with the thought that gamers may have a lower attention span than those looking at a local news app.

Figure 1: This screen summarizes some of the top placements where the Similar Audiences segment of visitors is showing the banner ads. Since this advertiser has chosen to include foreign nations, their ads are being shown to similar audiences both in the U.S. and internationally.

Conversion Results

The number of direct web conversions (orders or leads) you might see from the Similar Audiences campaign will be low. The number of “assisted” conversions, tends to be the same or lower, too. Those are conversions where your remarketing banners were seen at some point during a user’s conversion path through your site. But, because the similar group will provide so many more impressions and clicks, if you have set up Phone Call Lead tracking, you can expect to see more phone leads from this group (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: This chart compares results of the regular/standard remarketing campaign that targets actual visitors who previously visited the site and those who are “similar” to actual visitors. You can see that the Similar Audiences group generated 14 times the number of clicks, almost 30 times the number of impressions, and consumed 88% of the budget. It produced fewer direct web conversions (2 vs. 4), fewer assisted conversions (0 vs. 2), but more phone calls. As you can see, it’s a good supplement to the existing campaign.

Conclusion

If your AdWords Pay-Per-Click remarketing campaign is performing well, and you’d like to expand the number of impressions and clicks yours ads are receiving, consider expanding to show your ads to Similar Audiences. It will help grow your exposure by significant amounts, and can generate an additional source of web conversions.

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/reaching-similar-audiences-with-remarketing/feed/0How to Track Phone Call Leads with Google AdWordshttp://openmoves.com/blog/how-to-track-phone-call-leads-with-google-adwords/
http://openmoves.com/blog/how-to-track-phone-call-leads-with-google-adwords/#respondThu, 12 Mar 2015 15:45:16 +0000http://openmoves.com/?post_type=blog&p=7291Tracking phone call leads can be a nightmare. Luckily, there are various tools available for tying phone calls to specific lead sources. This article reviews how to do this in your Pay-Per-Click Ads on Google.

]]>One of the things that drives marketing people crazy is not being able to account for every single lead or sale generated by the website. Years ago, conversion tracking capabilities were rudimentary, at best. Often, you had to rely on the “how did you hear about us” drop down. Or, worse, when someone called, you had to ask them how they heard about you. These methods were just too unscientific. Nowadays, conversion tracking capabilities are very advanced and accurate. Using Google Analytics, for example, we can now tie a lead or purchase to a specific traffic source (Pay-Per-Click ad, organic search on Yahoo, referral from Facebook, etc.).

But tracking phone call leads? Still a nightmare!

Luckily, there are various tools available for tying phone calls to specific lead sources. This article reviews how to do this in your Pay-Per-Click Ads on Google. There are a number of software applications, such as DialogTech, that will allow you to tie a specific phone number to each referral source. But this article will not discuss these tools.

Basic PPC Call Tracking Capabilities

The simplest way to use Google AdWords to track phone calls is with an ad extension called “Call Extensions.” Creating a new extension that corresponds with your company phone number will allow you to display a phone number next to your PPC ad. See figure 1 for a summary of the configuration options available in Google AdWords.

Figure 1: This configuration screen in Google AdWords lets you establish call-tracking parameters for your pay-per-click ads, including the use of a Google forwarding number to accompany your ads, an option to only show the phone number, as well as scheduling options for showing the phone number at select times only.

Phone Number: here, you list your company phone number. You can create multiple extensions (i.e. multiple phone numbers), for example, if you wanted customers to be directed to different departments of your company based upon the ad you displayed.

Forwarding Number: this option allows Google to total all calls placed to the forwarding number Google will display.

Show Links: this option lets you limit your ad to allow users to either click to your website and click to call the phone number, or just see the phone number and call.

Device Preference: this lets you specify that the phone number should show only in your mobile ads.

Scheduling: here, you can determine a time period during which to show the phone number. For example, you might not want the phone number to display after your office closes.

Call Conversions: this powerful feature lets you tally “conversions” if certain criteria are met. For example, while tracking total phone call quantity is useful, you may consider a “phone lead” if the call lasts at least 60 seconds. This is especially important with lead generation sites for professional services as you may generate more phone leads that “contact us” leads.

Displaying Your Phone Number

More than likely, you have seen phone call extensions when you’ve done a Google search. Many advertisers smartly include the phone number next to branding ads, or those that include the company name. But it makes sense to show phone numbers for most other keyword searches that trigger your ads, as well. See figure 2.

Figure 2: This screenshot shows how a Google forwarding number displays next to the PPC ad. The number in the ad is not the company’s actual phone number, but a caller would get taken to the actual number upon placing the call.

Tracking Results

So, now that you’ve set up the phone call extension, you can use Google’s extensive reporting capabilities to review the results. See figure 3. Using this data, you can determine phone call-related metrics such as when the ad’s phone number was called, the duration, the area code of the caller, where/how the call was placed, and more. In addition, Google will report the type of call that occurs – i.e., a direct click on the number on a mobile device, a manual calling of the phone number, etc.

Figure 3: You can track the results of the phone number activity your ads produce. In this example, you can see each instance when the ad’s phone number was called, the duration, the area code of the caller, and where/how the call was placed (i.e. directly clicked from a mobile phone, manually dialed, etc.).

Conclusion

Very simply, some customers prefer to speak to a person by phone rather than fill a form or order online. Why limit the ways in which customers can submit lead requests or place orders? Displaying a phone number next to your pay-per-click ad will increase the conversion rate of your ad, yielding more leads or orders.

If you need helping setting up call tracking for your PPC campaigns, contact us for more information!

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/how-to-track-phone-call-leads-with-google-adwords/feed/0How to Adjust Your Paid Ad Campaigns for the Holidayshttp://openmoves.com/blog/how-to-adjust-your-paid-ad-campaigns-for-the-holidays/
http://openmoves.com/blog/how-to-adjust-your-paid-ad-campaigns-for-the-holidays/#respondThu, 04 Dec 2014 19:59:57 +0000http://openmoves.com/?post_type=blog&p=7264It’s not too late to adjust your paid advertising strategy to account for the holidays. But make smart decisions so that the budget increase you authorize will be especially profitable!

]]>You know the marketing people have taken over when you see “Pre Black Friday Sales.” It’s not enough to have a sale on Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, or Cyber Monday. Now retailers are offering pre-sales that start weeks before the actual dates! This kind of atmosphere is fantastic for consumers, especially the savvy ones among them. But it means that retailers need to think about keeping up with this trend. As of the writing of this blog, it’s already dangerously close to the prime part of the holiday season. So consider these last second holiday suggestions for your advertising campaigns.

Raise Advertising Budgets!

This one is obvious. You have to consider a budget increase for your advertising campaigns the last week in November and the first 2-plus week of December. Here are the key dates to remember:

Black Friday: November 28

Small Business Saturday: November 29

Cyber Monday: December 1

Christmas Rush: December 2 – 19*

Hanukkah: December 16

*This year, the 19th is considered the absolute last day retailers can ship orders and have them arrive by Christmas. In fact, it’s earlier when you account for cross country orders.

Look at your historical results. Have you raised budgets during the holidays in past years? Or, is this your first year running paid ads online? Be aggressive! Spending an extra $250, for example, is not going to break the bank, but will allow for the increase in “window shopping” (more on this later) that occurs during the holiday season.

Special Offers & Giveaways

Besides raising budgets, you have to develop some offers. Use coupon codes to coincide with each event is a good idea. For example:

BLACKFRIDAY12 (12% off on Black Friday only)

CYBERMONDAYFREE (free item on Cyber Monday)

HOLIDAYOFFER (buy one, get one offer during extended offer period)

In this way, you’ll be playing along with everyone else who’s running these types of promotions, including small retailers and the large box ones, too.

Another thing to consider is to run contests during this period. Incorporate contests or raffles into your advertising campaigns to entice people to click and join your marketing newsletters. A free giveaway to random customers can be a great way to increase newsletter membership. The few free gifts you will need to mail out will be outweighed by the new customers you will have added to your mailing lists.

Tailor Your Pay-Per-Click Ads

In your Pay-Per-Click campaigns on Google and Bing, it’s not enough to simply raise budgets. You should write new ad variations that promote your offers and let customers know you are running holiday specials. This can be done in various places in your Pay-Per-Click accounts. For example:

in promotional text that displays next to your Google Shopping campaigns

Run Remarketing Ads

As we mentioned earlier, this time of year brings a much larger number of “window shoppers.” Customers are more motivated to make purchases now, and they are shopping around for good deals. This means that a large percentage of those who click on your ads might be shopping for the best price, rather than motivated to purchase there on the spot. Capitalize on this trend by expanding your advertising to run remarketing ads, which show banners ads to these same people when they’re looking at other websites.

Remarketing is so powerful because it allows you to promote an offer specifically to people who already visited your site. You can use this as an opportunity to reclaim them as a customer by promoting a “second chance” offer to them. And if you’re running a Google Shopping campaign, you can use Dynamic Remarketing to show these people actual products that they looked at on your site.

Remarketing Platforms

There are various ways to run remarketing ads on the Internet. OpenMoves recommends Google AdWords and AdRoll. Google obviously reaches the entire Google Display Network, which is a network of thousands of websites that have opted to show banner ads on their sites. Through AdWords, advertisers have a large set of criteria which they can use to determine where they want their banners to display. For example, you might want to limit your power tool ad to only show on home improvement sites. Or, you might want to make sure your remarketing banner promoting women’s shoes only shows to women. This demographic-level targeting can boost the ROI (return on investment) of your advertising campaigns.

AdRoll is a platform that reaches not only the Google Network, but also into Bing and Yahoo, and, most importantly, Facebook.

Figure 1: This remarketing ad appears in our Facebook newsfeed. We see it because we previously visited this website looking for lawn mowers. In this way, the ad is targeted to our past search history.

Conversion Tracking

Make sure you’re tracking conversions (leads, orders, etc.)! Otherwise, how do you know if your advertising budget is working for you?

Conclusion

It’s not too late to adjust your paid advertising strategy to account for the holidays. But make smart decisions so that the budget increase you authorize will be especially profitable!

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/how-to-adjust-your-paid-ad-campaigns-for-the-holidays/feed/0Pay Per Click Advertising – An Introduction to Bing Adshttp://openmoves.com/blog/pay-per-click-advertising-an-introduction-to-bing-ads/
http://openmoves.com/blog/pay-per-click-advertising-an-introduction-to-bing-ads/#respondThu, 28 Aug 2014 00:36:15 +0000http://openmoves.com/?post_type=blog&p=6935Looking to supplement your PPC results? Then how about giving Bing Ads a turn. Considered by many to be Google AdWords’ younger brother, Bing Ads like to mimic its older brother in every way, from interface to conversion tracking to keyword bidding methodology.

]]>Bing Ads might be considered Google AdWords’ younger brother – it likes to mimic its older brother in every way, from interface to conversion tracking to keyword bidding methodology. While it falls short on many of the bells and whistles available in Google, Bing Ads can be a very useful tool for supplementing PPC results.

If you are spending money with Google AdWords for your lead generation or ecommerce site don’t forget to allocate some budget to Bing Ads. In many cases we found Bing Ads to have different results, and in some cases superior, to Google. The demographics may be different and can result in higher conversions rates and lower costs.

Establishing a Bing Ads Account

Creating a Bing Ads account is similar to creating an AdWords account. You need to create a Microsoft account first. We suggest using the same email address and password for Bing as you do for AdWords. This way you can easily log in to each account. If you don’t have someone managing the accounts for you, you will want to make sure to log in at least once every 2 days, but preferably every day, to watch over and micro-manage the account.

Although you can set budgets like you can with Google, it is important not to “set it and forget it.” Spending might be limited based on the budget, but you really want to control where you allocate your budget to make sure it is going to the keyword topics that provide the most return on investment (ROI).

Google AdWords Import

Perhaps one of Bing Ads’ smartest features is its seamless ability to let you import campaigns directly from Google AdWords. You simply provide account login details, and Bing will let you pick and choose which campaigns from Google to import. Bing will even customize the tracking codes you have on ad destination URLs. If no tracking codes are on your PPC ad destination URLs, then you will want to make sure you add them.

The reason to add the tracking codes is that although Google AdWords and Google Analytics are seamlessly integrated, Bing Ads are not recognized as a traffic referrer in Google Analytics. Instead, Google Analytics will lump all clicks from Bing—paid and unpaid—as “Bing Organic,” which does not allow you to differentiate between paid and non-paid traffic from Bing. For obvious reasons, doing so can be a highly effective method for measuring ROI of your Bing Ads campaigns.

Figure 1: The “Import from Google AdWords” tool within Bing Ads allows you to seamlessly import any and all campaigns from Google into your Bing Ads account, saving you tremendous time and effort.

Conversion Tracking

Like AdWords, Bing Ads tallies conversions (orders, contact requests, etc.) through a conversion code snippet that must be added to a confirmation page – i.e. the thank you page that loads after an order is placed or lead form is submitted. This small block of JavaScript code needs to get added to that page’s source code, somewhere above the closing tag. Then, when a Bing Ads PPC ad is clicked and the user converts on your site, Bing Ads can tally the conversion in your account, and tie it directly to the referring keyword.

When managing your campaigns, the ability to determine which keywords are converting into new customers or leads can be extremely helpful when determining a) the ROI of each campaign and b) how to effectively allocate your budget moving forward.

Bing Ad’s Shiny, New Interface

Bing recently updated its interface to mirror Google AdWords’ interface. All campaigns can now be accessed in the left column, like on Google, and the campaign settings can be modified via the tabbed menu on the right. Below that, campaign summary details can be viewed and customized. This new look allows for much easier navigation to the various parts of the account, and allows for easier management of the settings, as on Google.

How to Budget for Bing

When carving up your monthly advertising budget, we like to suggest allocating a small percentage of the budget (say, around 20%) to Bing Ads. And we always suggest implementing this at least one month after launching Google AdWords. The reason is that the experience we gain from running AdWords for 30 days can offer valuable insights into what might work for Bing Ads.

It’s important to note that the volume on Bing is far less than on Google. Even though Bing Ads supplies paid search results for both the Bing and Yahoo search engines, they still capture only a minority of the overall search market.

Summary of Unavailable Features

Google AdWords is a very robust advertising tool. Its use gains you access to a large network of websites where Google Ads display, including banner ads on other websites, remarketing ads shown to users who previously visited your site, and Google Shopping ads that display your ecommerce products. Bing Ads, however, does not offer the same robust set of features as AdWords. For example, these features are not yet available in Bing:1) Robust Shopping feed integration to allow you to control your ecommerce product listings2) Remarketing and Dynamic Remarketing functionality3) Display/banner ads

Although Bing does have Bing Merchant Center, its features are secondary to Google’s more robust Shopping network for showing product ads and promoting different ecommerce offers. Similarly, although remarketing is technically available on the Bing (and Yahoo) platforms, these campaigns cannot be created in Bing Ads itself. Instead, you need to look to third party tools like AdRoll to run remarketing ads on the Bing network.

Conclusion

If you imagine that your advertising budget is like a pie, carved up into several pieces for each account, the Bing Ads piece would be on the small side (maybe 1-2 slices of the pies). But it would be just enough to wet your appetite! Thus, apportioning a percentage of your budget to Bing Ads, especially because of the AdWords import functionality, is a good idea and you may be surprised with some of the results.

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/pay-per-click-advertising-an-introduction-to-bing-ads/feed/0Pay Per Click Advertising- An Introductionhttp://openmoves.com/blog/pay-per-click-advertising-an-introduction/
Tue, 22 Apr 2014 18:07:01 +0000http://openmoves.com/?post_type=blog&p=6597In this series of articles, we'll explore what it takes to set up an effective PPC campaign and how you can generate a positive ROI for your business without breaking the bank. You can have a small business with minimal web presence, yet your ads can show on Google 1st page alongside powerhouses like Amazon and eBay, and still generate a positive return on investment!

]]>We like to think of Pay-Per-Click advertising as the “great equalizer.” You can have a small business with minimal web presence, yet your ads can show on Google 1st page alongside powerhouses like Amazon and eBay, and still generate a positive return on investment!

Running successful Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns, especially on Google via AdWords, comes from a combination of targeting the right audience, spending the right amount of money every month, writing effective call-to-action-based ads, choosing the right keywords, quality destination pages, and ongoing review of results and optimization. In this series of articles, we’ll explore what it takes to set up an effective PPC campaign and how you can generate a positive ROI for your business without breaking the bank.

How PPC Works

Pay-Per-Click ads can be seen at the top (Figure 1) or the right-hand side (Figure 2) of Google after you’ve performed a keyword search.

Figure 1: A Google search for “snow joe” yields a row of Google Shopping product ads and a regular paid text ad. You can tell they’re paid ads because either you’ll see the word “Sponsored” for Shopping ads or “Ad” for text ads.

Figure 2: A Google search for “roof repair long island” yields several paid ads at the right, including a combination of larger size agencies and smaller, mom and pop-based companies. A few of the ads even display an address and phone number because that advertiser has integrated his Google Local listing with his paid ad.

Setting PPC Criteria

Each of the ads that appear display to users based on certain criteria that the advertiser set:

What the advertiser set as their daily budget

Which keywords they’ve chosen to be shown for

Which geography or time of day to be shown for

How relevant the ad is to your search phrase

What the advertiser has agreed to pay per click

So, as you can see, there are many factors that go into determining why a particular ad appears. Of all the factors, the average cost per click and cost per conversion are, perhaps, the most important metrics to an advertiser. Since Google suggests the average cost per click totals for each keyword for which you might want your ad to appear, it is important to choose a wide selection of terms that might be used to show your ads. Unless you have an unlimited budget, you will need to manage the bid prices of all your keywords and allocate the budget in the most efficient way possible.

The bottom line is that whether you have a lead generation ad or an ecommerce ad you need to look at what it costs you to “convert” from a browser to a lead or to a sale.

One “back of the napkin” calculation is to see how much you are willing to pay for a conversion:

As an example, if the average cost per click is $1 and your budget is $1,000/month you received 1,000 clickers. Of those, let’s say that 2% converted to a lead or sale, meaning it cost you $20 per conversion. Is $20 per conversion good for you? Only you can answer that but it will give you an indication of how profitable PPC can be for your business.

How Can You Compete?

When running PPC ads, it’s easy to get sticker shock. Much high volume, generic keywords cost upwards of $10 or more to appear on the first page of results. Think of your business, then consider what your unique keywords might be. This is the word that best describes your company or product. For example: “accountant,” “washing machines,” “flood insurance.” It is very likely that you will have to spend upwards of $10 or more every time someone clicks your ad if you use such generic keywords (which we also call “short tail” keywords. This can become shockingly expensive.

For this reason, it’s important to establish a category of keyword phrases, which you’ll eventually need to implement in Google as Campaigns and Ad Groups. We’ll review campaign and ad groups’ structure in a future article. Meanwhile, the right structure will allow you to target a combination of generic and specific keyword phrases, as well as expensive vs. less expensive terms.

For example, let’s say you want to establish an AdWords account for a Roof Repair business. First, you need to decide where you want to target your ads. Let’s say you’re a local business and only service a small area. Second, you need to decide which of your services should be advertised. “Roof repair” is a general term, but a more specific service you offer could yield a very profitable ad.

Lastly, if you sell products on your site, then establish a Google Shopping campaign can allow you to show product thumbnails in the Google home and Shopping results (see Figure 1 above). These ads display based on the establishment of a product feed containing all of your items. We’ll focus on Google Shopping campaigns in a futer blog post.

Summary

When would more sales or leads not be useful to your business? Only if they cost more than you can afford but otherwise the more the merrier! Thus, expanding your advertising to include Pay-Per-Click ads on Google can be a cost-effective way to grow your business.

]]>In the ever-expanding world of Google AdWords Pay-Per-Click advertising, Google has again bolstered its list of available ad extensions that you can include alongside your paid ads. These ad extensions are essentially “add-on” features that can improve the look and feel of your ads, improve click-through, and help convert customers more effectively.

Here’s the list of available ad extensions in Google AdWords, including how each one can be used to bolster performance of your advertising account:

This extension ties directly into a Google Places for Businessaccount, where you can establish listings for each of your company’s locations. While you do not need to use a Google Places account to add location extensions, you’ll get much more in-depth statistics about its performance, if you do.

Call Extension

Displays a phone number next to your ad.

Extremely valuable, especially on mobile devices.

Google strongly encourages the use of this extension because it is usually improves your chances of converting leads into paying customers if you can get them on the phone, directly engaged with your sales staff. If a user clicks the phone number to call it on a mobile device, you pay on a cost-per-click basis. If a user calls the number directly, you do not pay.

Incorporates additional links to other pages of your site into your ad.

Provides obvious visual benefit to your Google.com text search ads.

Say you want to bolster your ad that appears when a user searches for your company or brand name. In addition to the ad headline, text, and standard URL, you might want to include a direct link to your Free Quote Request form, or your Testimonials page, or perhaps you might want to link directly to your Clearance page that promotes products with big discounts. These clicks cost the same as clicks on your regular ad.

While you could use regular ad text to present a coupon, but the best way to roll this out, since coupons might be temporary, would be to implement an offer extension and specify all of the necessary parameters. A user can click to find out what the parameters are and, as noted, you can track redemptions with AdWords conversion tracking.

Because Google is aggressively pushing Google+ as a social media and marketing platform, this is one way to bolster your Google+ page’s activity. It’s easy to add this extension if you have a working Google+ account, and there’s no downside to doing it.

Dynamic Search Ad Extension

Automatically shows your ad based on the content of your website.

No need to choose keywords, you simply tell Google when you add a page to your website or take it down, and Google will dynamically update your ad accordingly.

Traditional text search ads use keywords to trigger ads. With Dynamic Search Ads, while your ad will still appear when someone does a keyword search, the criteria for how the ad gets triggered aren’t based on keywords you specifically set. This is an advanced feature of AdWords, one which we will blog about more specifically, in the future. Sign up here to stay in the loop!

Google AdWords APP Extension

App Extension

Includes a direct download link for a downloadableapp, under your ad.

Especially useful if you want to direct people to use that app on a mobile device.

If you have a new app that you want to roll out, you could of course promote it on your website and in email blasts. But, being able to include it within your PPC ad will simply give it much greater exposure than you might otherwise get, and immediate access for mobile users.

Summary

Google AdWords is an extremely powerful marketing tool. Capitalizing on all its features, including Ad Extensions, can be very rewarding and profitable if done properly.

]]>PPC: To Bid or Not to Bidhttp://openmoves.com/blog/ppc-to-bid-or-not-to-bid/
http://openmoves.com/blog/ppc-to-bid-or-not-to-bid/#respondTue, 05 Feb 2013 22:49:54 +0000http://blog.openmoves.com/?p=4343PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is aptly named: you pay every time someone clicks your ad on Google or on partner sites. In the old days of PPC, paying for clicks was built on a “testosterone-based” auction model. The more you were …

]]>PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is aptly named: you pay every time someone clicks your ad on Google or on partner sites. In the old days of PPC, paying for clicks was built on a “testosterone-based” auction model. The more you were willing to pay, the higher your ad appeared on the page. This has been completely replaced with algorithm-based bidding, where Google determines the rank of an ad by various factors including historic performance, landing page Quality Score, and competition.

When setting up or optimizing your Google AdWords account, it’s important to decide how you want to display your ads. You can choose between one of 3 options: standard cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-acquisition (CPA), or cost-per-thousand (CPM). Each has its benefits and detriments. So, without further ado, here is an explanation of each method.

Cost-Per-Click (CPC) Bidding

This is the traditional way advertisers have always spent money on Google. You create a campaign, populate ad groups with keywords and ads, set a particular maximum cost-per-click total for the group, and then let it run! So, for example, if you specify a $1 cost-per-click bid for Ad Group A, this means that, on average, a $100 budget would produce at least 100 clicks.

It’s important to realize that the CPC you set is the maximum amount you are willing to pay. Very rarely do you ever pay the full total, on average, per click, unless you are using just 1 keyword. The average of all the keywords you have included, combined with factors such as competition, Quality Score, etc., tends to yield an average cost-per-click somewhere south of the maximum you originally set.

Fig. 2: This ad group has been set to target a maximum CPC of 50 cents, but the group is actually yielding a lower, average CPC of 32 cents.

Depending on the results–or your goals–you might want to raise or lower the average CPC for each ad group. You’d want to raise it if you want to help your ad achieve a higher ad position (though this isn’t the only factor that would determine ad position, as we stated above). Conversely, you’d want to lower it if the number of leads were low, or if you felt that paying a lower average cost-per-click–and, therefore, achieving a lower ad position–was more profitable.

Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) Bidding

The CPA bidding model is perhaps one of Google AdWords’ most successful new features. It was instituted a few years ago and is a modified CPC bidding option. Instead of specifying a certain maximum cost-per-click for your ad group, you instead specify a maximum cost-per-acquisition amount. As long as you’ve implemented AdWords Conversion Tracking to track sales or leads, you can let AdWords deliver traffic to your ads based on which keywords have collectively generated sales/leads that correspond with a specific cost per sale/lead amount. Sound confusing?

Fig. 3: This ad group has been set to target a maximum CPA of $40, meaning that the cost per sale should never be higher than $40 each. However, it has instead, yielded an amazingly low CPA of $4.25!

With the CPA bidding method, it is important to remember that you are still paying an average cost-per-click for your ad group; however, the difference is that you are leaving this to Google to decide. You only care that at the end of a specified period, your ad group should have yielded a cost per sales/lead at or below the total you originally specified.

As an example, if you specify a max CPA of $50 and you have a $100 budget, this says that you will let Google charge per click whatever it needs to in order for your ad group to have produced at least 2 sales/leads by the time the $100 budget is reached. This would mean that your $100 budget produced a cost-per-acquisition of $50.

Cost-Per-Thousand (CPM) Bidding

The CPM bidding method is mainly used for branding strategies via banner ads or image ads that show on Google’s Display Network sites, including YouTube, Fox News, About.com and more. Instead of paying for every click, you pay a combined cost for every 1,000 impressions your ad receives.

Let’s say you run an advertising agency. You might want to use this bidding strategy to promote a new perfume for one of your major clients, supplementing offline advertising efforts. By paying per impression, you are ensuring your ad gets a certain amount of exposure and you don’t have to pay each time someone clicks. Banner ads tend to have a very low clickthrough rate anyway, so the CPM model helps maximize exposure and brand awareness.

PPC Bidding Methods: Summary

When working to optimize results in your AdWords Pay-Per-Click account, choosing a bidding method for your ad groups should be determined by your goals and objectives. If you want total control over the average cost-per-click of your ads, choose a standard CPC bidding method. If you want to let Google determine the cost-per-click and, instead, aim to achieve a specific cost-per-acquisition, choose the CPA bidding method. Lastly, if you wish to generate massive impressions for the purposes of branding and exposure, utilize the cost-per-thousand CPM bidding method. Happy bidding!

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/ppc-to-bid-or-not-to-bid/feed/03 Ways to Start Advertising on Facebookhttp://openmoves.com/blog/3-ways-to-start-advertising-on-facebook/
Thu, 25 Oct 2012 14:57:26 +0000http://blog.openmoves.com/?p=3532It may be time to start a Facebook advertising campaign. If you've developed a solid social media strategy, and if your company’s Facebook page is filled with robust content (posts, pictures, user feedback, etc.), then it is worthwhile to consider advertising to Facebook. They have come a long way since the early days, and the advertising capabilities are now surprisingly robust.

]]>It may be time to start a Facebook advertising campaign.
If you watched The Social Network, you may remember that a critical bone of contention among the founders was when to add advertising capabilities to Facebook as a way to monetize the site. Facebook has come a long way since the early days, and the advertising capabilities are now surprisingly robust.

Given a limited budget, you would still be better served allocating a majority of it to Pay-Per-Click advertising, especially on Google. However, if you’ve developed a solid social media strategy, and if your company’s Facebook page is filled with robust content (posts, pictures, user feedback, etc.), then it is worthwhile to consider advertising to Facebook.
There are various ways to advertise on Facebook. For this article, we’ll focus on 3:

Promote an Individual Post: Those who like your page, and their friends, will see your promoted post as a sponsored story in their news feed. Since these people can like, comment, or share this post, the additional exposure your post would get by promoting it could only translate to more leads or sales.

“Claim an Offer”: Create an offer, like a coupon, for use on your web site or in your brick and mortar location, and enable your Facebook followers to “claim” it.

Promote an Individual Post

One of the easiest ways to advertise on Facebook is to simply promote an individual post. When logged in as an account administrator, as you get ready to post something, you will see a “Promote” button. When you press it, you will see options for how to initialize advertising for the post.

For example, you can choose a budget, decide who your audience is, and specify a duration for the promotion. Individual promotion is especially useful if you want to increase exposure of a post which references a special offer that expires at some point in the near future.

You can increase exposure of a particular post on Facebook with the “Promote” option.

“Claim an Offer”

This is a relatively new feature of Facebook advertising. The concept behind it is that you can allow your Facebook followers to access a particular offer by “claiming it.” There are 3 kinds of offers:

In-Store Only: People can show to the staff at your business by printing the offer email or showing it on their smartphones.

In-Store & Online: People can redeem at your business’s physical location or website.

Online Only: People can only redeem your offer by visiting your website.

You can allow users to “claim an offer” either online only, or within a physical store location.

This is extremely easy to setup. Let’s say you simply want to create an online coupon and allow Facebook followers to claim it (option #3 above). Instead of posting a regular message via the “status” option, you would choose “Offer, Event +.” Choose Offer, then “Online Only” and add some simple offer details. When this offer gets added to your page, a user can click to claim or redeem the offer by agreeing to the terms. They’ll then receive the offer details via email. Since it’s a web offer, you would make sure to specify the URL of your store where your Facebook follower can redeem the coupon.

Conversely, if you chose to allow redemption in a physical store, you can include a printable coupon (with barcode) that the user can print from their email and bring in to your physical location.

Pay-Per-Click Ads

With Facebook’s pay-per-click you compose a text/image ad, and then either pay per 1,000 impressions (CPM) or on a per-click basis (CPC). This makes it a little bit more like Google AdWords. If you currently run Google AdWords advertising, this Facebook option will feel most familiar to you. However, the targeting options are significantly better than Google as Facebook knows so much more about each of us. You will have various options for how to target your ad.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s just assume you want to increase the “likes” for your page. When you choose to set up the ad via the Build Audience> Create an Ad button, you can customize the following audience-related options:

By specifying certain audience characteristics (location, age, gender, interests), you can increase or decrease the reach of your paid ad on Facebook.

Connections (target to anyone, or just people who aren’t already followers of your page)

Friends of Connections (target to your followers’ fiends)

These options give you a very precise level of targeting options to promote your Facebook page (or your website’s URL, if you choose to send users directly there instead).

Already have experience with Facebook advertising? We’d love to hear about it. Connect with us on Facebook by clicking here:https://www.facebook.com/OpenMovesInc. Post your thoughts for a chance to be part of our next PPC case study. And if you have questions or need help setting up your first advertising Facebook PPC campaign give us a holler.

]]>Remember When Froogle Was Free?http://openmoves.com/blog/remember-when-froogle-was-free/
http://openmoves.com/blog/remember-when-froogle-was-free/#respondMon, 18 Jun 2012 15:39:25 +0000http://blog.openmoves.com/?p=2839Google Shopping, once called Froogle, then Google Base, then Google Products, will soon no longer be a free service for online merchants with a list of products and a dream. On May 31, Google announced that Google Shopping will now …

]]>Google Shopping, once called Froogle, then Google Base, then Google Products, will soon no longer be a free service for online merchants with a list of products and a dream. On May 31, Google announced that Google Shopping will now be a pay-per-use service that will allow shoppers to easily research purchases, compare different products, their features and prices, and then connect directly with merchants to make their purchase. This is expected to occur in August and September.

So, for Marketers, will Froogle be Frugal?

At first, this might seem like very bad news to merchants who already see excellent referral sales from this source. After all, Google has never charged you to list your site’s product inventory in its system. Except for the hassle of complying with the various feed specification changes and modifications, by and large, Google Products has probably been a steady referrer of residual revenue for as long as it has been active for your site.

Indeed, this probably is bad news for some merchants, especially smaller shops that don’t utilize Google AdWords for Pay-Per-Click advertising, or who have very small advertising budgets. However, it is not bad news for merchants with a strong inventory, original product description content, competitive pricing, and a wide selection. Therefore, this news can be a very positive development for many merchants.

Figure 1 – Snapshot of the Google Products Dashboard. This will undoubtedly be replaced with an enhanced Dashboard when Google Shopping premiers in August 2012.

Lost in this news are the improvements that online shoppers will experience once Google’s new model is in place. Google’s theory is that higher quality data – whether it’s accurate prices, the latest offers, or product availability – should mean better shopping results for users, which in turn should create higher quality traffic for merchants.

Connect Pay-Per-Click and Google Products Accounts

Right now, merchants who have Google AdWords PPC accounts can connect their AdWords and Products accounts so that their products can display on Google.com when users search for specific products.

This will continue to be the case once Google Shopping goes live, but the difference is that merchants will have more control over when they appear on the front page, as opposed to simply appearing within the Google Shopping section. Although the costs have not yet been finalized, odds are that merchants will need to pay a cost-per-listing fee either based on the number of items or the number of clicks received.

Next Steps for Merchants

Merchants who utilize Google AdWords for PPC advertising should consider adding some product listing ads such as the ones shown in Figure 2 above. They can test to see how these perform and then expand as the budget allows.

Merchants who only utilize Google Products right now – and not AdWords – should consider creating a Google AdWords account. Even if they don’t plan to run regular PPC keyword ads, they can initiate some product listing ads to see how they perform.

Merchants who have neither Google AdWords nor Google Products accounts should get started on Google Products now to take advantage of the free service up until August. Then, transitioning to the paid model will be slightly easier.

If you need help navigating the right strategy for your PPC or SEO give us a holler.

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/remember-when-froogle-was-free/feed/0B2B Lead-Gen Campaign Results in 280% Conversion Rate Lifthttp://openmoves.com/blog/b2b-lead-generation/
http://openmoves.com/blog/b2b-lead-generation/#respondThu, 15 Mar 2012 13:47:19 +0000http://blog.openmoves.com/?p=2532For an effective pay-per-click (Adwords) campaign it’s just as important to have the right landing pages as it is to have the right keywords and ads. To achieve high conversion landing pages design them with simple, succinct, and targeted messaging …

]]>For an effective pay-per-click (Adwords) campaign it’s just as important to have the right landing pages as it is to have the right keywords and ads. To achieve high conversion landing pages design them with simple, succinct, and targeted messaging with a clear call-to-action; a reader will give you no more than a few seconds to make a decision whether to click, or to click away. For best results, create a few different variations of the landing page and conduct some A/B or MVT (multivariate testing) to see which design and call-to-action generate the highest conversion at the lowest cost.

LabEscape is a technology company that needed help improving the conversion of their lead generation PPC campaign. We utilized the advanced LiveBall landing page platform together with creative design and strategy and were able to increase their conversion to more than 4% within a few months (a 280% increase!). Read more about this in the recently published landing page case study on LiveBall website.

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/b2b-lead-generation/feed/0Google’s New Privacy Policy & Paid Ads (PPC)http://openmoves.com/blog/new-google-privacy-policy/
http://openmoves.com/blog/new-google-privacy-policy/#respondFri, 06 Jan 2012 14:56:37 +0000http://blog.openmoves.com/?p=2351When you sign in to Google.com, your organic search is conducted in a secure context. If you visit a site from those search results, the visit is still categorized as organic, but your query terms are not available in the …

]]>When you sign in to Google.com, your organic search is conducted in a secure context. If you visit a site from those search results, the visit is still categorized as organic, but your query terms are not available in the report. The label (not provided) is used in place of the query terms.

Referral traffic and cpc traffic are not affected by the secure context, nor are any of your other statistics like conversion rates.

– Google Analytics Help

One of the most powerful data charts available to you in Google Analytics is the Referring Keyword report under the Traffic Sources > Search section. In here, you can determine user referral and on-site activity deriving from organic and paid search word activity. For example, you can determine the number of visits from these referrals, pages/visit, average time spent on site, and conversion data such as Goals (leads) or Sales.

Chart 1:

For obvious reasons, knowing what keywords are yielding high quality visitors, those who stay long or convert to customers, is very valuable information. You can use this information to determine which organic keywords have yielded conversions and thus add those keywords to your paid advertising campaign. Or, vice versa, knowing which words produce conversions via PPC might assist you in determining which words to target for improved organic visibility.

Chart 2:

But Google’s new Privacy Policy addition throws a monkey wrench into this situation. Now, Google searches from organic sources done via a logged in** Google account will no longer be reported. You will now see a big fat “Not Provided” appearing in your organic search report! While this applies to a relatively small amount of users (less than 10% right now according to Google), this number will most likely rise as people become savvier and search Google via personalized accounts. This dearth of information will most likely become increasingly problematic for those who rely on accurate search results to fuel their organic search engine optimization strategies.

** This refers to users who created a Google account at one time or another and clicked to login to Google.com prior to performing their keyword search.

Chart 3:

The good news is that referrals from paid search are exempt from this restriction. All keywords that you purchase via a paid advertising account in Google AdWords are completely tracked and measured. For this reason, running paid ads on Google has become an even more important and vital part of the Internet marketing mix.

Chart 4:

Keyword data (visits, conversions, etc.) is recorded within the Google AdWords account, as always. But more qualitative, in-depth data is available via Google Analytics. Therefore, the ability to have complete and accurate keyword referral data makes running paid advertising an even more valuable thing.

When deciding where to allocate your Internet marketing budget, knowing that you will get more accurate data from paid advertising might influence your decision to either initiate a PPC account or allocate more money to that account in future months.

Many sources vie for your advertising budget – banner ads, organic search engine optimization, email marketing, etc. It’s critical to operate with as accurate a set of data as possible so that you can be sure you are making the right Internet marketing decisions.

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/new-google-privacy-policy/feed/0Improve Pay-Per-Click Results with Google’s Conversion Optimizer Toolhttp://openmoves.com/blog/improve-pay-per-click-results-with-googles-conversion-optimizer-tool/
http://openmoves.com/blog/improve-pay-per-click-results-with-googles-conversion-optimizer-tool/#respondSat, 09 Jul 2011 17:51:03 +0000http://174.121.152.9/~openmove/blog/?p=1341Are you using Pay Per Click advertising (Google AdWords) for lead generation or online sales? If so you need to check out a cool new free Google tool called the Conversion Optimizer. The Conversion Optimizer outsmarts the traditional keyword bidding …

]]>Are you using Pay Per Click advertising (Google AdWords) for lead generation or online sales? If so you need to check out a cool new free Google tool called the Conversion Optimizer. The Conversion Optimizer outsmarts the traditional keyword bidding war strategy, delivering traffic to the words that it thinks will convert better for you. This is a radical change in the way AdWords operates because you no longer need to fight it out with the next guy over who will pay top dollar for each keyword. No more modifying individual keyword bids in qualifying ad groups.

Think of it this way. A security guard is standing outside your store. The guard is Google and the people walking by are keywords. With old-school AdWords you fix the price you are willing to pay your trusty security guard for each person he lets in to your store. Then, you just hope and pray that some of people he let in actually make a purchase. Depending on the results, you continue to hand-pick the people the guard lets in, based on how much you’re willing to pay him for each person – boring! That type of nickel-and-diming your way to the top can get old fast.

With the Conversion Optimizer, the guard standing outside your door (still Google) decides which people to let in based on historical results. Don’t let the snazzy new name fool you, though – you’re still paying on a cost-per-click basis; the difference is that you are letting the guard determine this cost by targeting a cost per acquisition, not a cost per click. So lucky you! Google is now going to send in the people most likely to buy from you – cha-ching!

Timeframe: A recent 2 monthType of site: E-commerce B2CFeatures: All the normal ad group metrics

*The difference is that there is no “Default Max CPC” column anymore

Normally, this column would display the maximum cost-per-click you have set as a default for all keywords in the ad group. Instead, the “Max CPA” column now indicates the maximum price per acquisition (sale or lead) you are willing to pay.

How Do I Use This Tool?

In Google AdWords, you can no longer catapult your ad to the top of the list just because you set the cost-per-click (“MAX CPC”) higher than other advertisers. Remember: it’s quality — not quantity — that counts. Here, the Quality Score plays more of a roll in determining the order of ads on the search results page. The Quality Score is determined by a number of factors, including the relevancy of your landing page to the particular keyword. So, you could very well be paying a lower average cost per click on certain keywords than another advertiser, yet have a higher average position. How’s that for leveling the playing field?

These days, running a successful AdWords campaign involves not only identifying the best keywords and writing successful ads, but providing relevant landing pages for each of your ads. Utilizing the new and improved Conversion Optimizer tool can bring further profitability to your account because Google is itself determining the keywords most likely to yield leads/sales to your website. So leave the days of bidding wars behind, and try the Conversion Optimizer today!

Are you running a PPC campaign? Are you happy with the cost and performance? Do you use Conversion Optimizer or max CPA?

]]>Does this sound like you? You got your email campaign cranking and now it’s time to integrate your latest product information video into your latest e-newsletter.

So you’ve created a channel on YouTube for your business. You uploaded your logo, added your bio, and customized the color scheme and it’s looking pretty slick. You’ve uploaded a few video clips, you’re excited to share them with the world and you sit back and wait for the leads to start generating. A little time goes by, your clip views are in the single digits, and you ponder with a giant question mark over your head, “what am I doing wrong?”

Like Facebook and Twitter, YouTube is another great community to tap into when you are looking to promote your business and attract new clients. Creating short, informative video clips is an excellent way to familiarize people with your business and the products and service you offer. The trick to making your YouTube channel an inbound marketing success is to properly optimizing your videos clips for the search engines so people will find them.

Here are six ways you can search engine optimize your YouTube videos today to get them a top ranking in Google. For each video you’ve uploaded, edit its setting in the following ways:

Title – Use descriptive keywords in your title: Your video clips will rank higher if you use descriptive keywords in the video’s title rather than filler words or quirky titles. For example: How to Search Engine Optimize Your YouTube Videos is better than Get More People To See Your Stuff.

Description – Bonus tip! Link to your website: Funnel traffic from your YouTube video to your website or blog by including the URL, (including the http://), in the video’s description. Place it at the very beginning of the description so it’s always visible to the viewer even if the “more info” option is collapsed.

Tags – Add tags: Tags are the keywords people are searching for when they are trying to find a video clip. Use up to ten keywords or keyword phrases to describe your video.

Annotations – Include video annotation: Video annotations allow you to add interactive commentary to your clips. Though this feature doesn’t necessarily help your video with regards to the search engines, your annotations can link to your other video clips, further increasing their views and allowing viewers to easily find your related clips.

So just like your email campaigns, creating a YouTube channel can be a valuable part of your marketing strategy if executed properly. The most important thing to remember when posting video clips to YouTube is to provide content that is valuable to your viewers. Get your content in front of the right people by putting these six tips to use today.

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/6-ways-to-search-engine-optimize-your-youtube-videos/feed/0The Yahoo/Microsoft Search Alliancehttp://openmoves.com/blog/the-yahoomicrosoft-search-alliance/
http://openmoves.com/blog/the-yahoomicrosoft-search-alliance/#respondMon, 26 Jul 2010 13:05:25 +0000http://www.openmoves.com/blog/?p=796As an e-marketer, you might be wondering how the upcoming Yahoo/Microsoft Search Alliance may or may not affect you. Even though you might use Google for all your search needs, your goal is to have visibility on all search engines, so here is …

As an e-marketer, you might be wondering how the upcoming Yahoo/Microsoft Search Alliance may or may not affect you. Even though you might use Google for all your search needs, your goal is to have visibility on all search engines, so here is an update on what will be happening on Yahoo and Microsoft Bing:Natural Search

Yahoo Search, along with Bing, will now be supplied by Microsoft. This means that if you have a site that has great organic visibility on Yahoo, but none on Bing, you’re in trouble. If you are equally visible on both, but rely on Google anyway, this is probably the way it is for most sites. In this case, you could do almost nothing, and expect the same results. However, putting new efforts into optimizing the site for Yahoo/Bing would be a good idea, since the combined search volume will at least begin to approach Google. This whole process will start taking effect in August and will probably complete by the end of August.

Paid Search (PPC)

The Yahoo Pay-Per-Click platform will be going away, probably as early as September. Microsoft AdCenter will now allow you to manage paid results on both Yahoo and Bing. Essentially, AdCenter will show the same ads on both Yahoo and Bing. AdCenter will operate much the same as it has been except that now, obviously, there are a lot more keywords available, and existing keywords have much more search volume. Anyone using tracking codes on PPC ads will need to change these, but, by and large, as long as the AdCenter account that has been setup is built out as well or better than it is in Yahoo, not much else will need to be done when the switchover is made. The Yahoo accounts will simply not be active anymore.

As you can see, a lot of changes will be happening over the next few months. We will continue to keep you updated on how this initiative might affect your e-marketing efforts. In the meantime, feel free to contact us to find out how we can help optimize and evolve your Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click programs.

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/the-yahoomicrosoft-search-alliance/feed/0Case Study: Zap My Taxhttp://openmoves.com/blog/case-study-zap-my-tax/
http://openmoves.com/blog/case-study-zap-my-tax/#respondMon, 24 May 2010 09:49:08 +0000http://www.openmoves.com/blog/?p=702Background Zap My Tax/Property Assessment Correction Group is a local agency that provides property tax reduction services for Suffolk County, New York residents. Their business is seasonal in that the deadline to file a tax grievance in Suffolk County is

BackgroundZap My Tax/Property Assessment Correction Group is a local agency that provides property tax reduction services for Suffolk County, New York residents. Their business is seasonal in that the deadline to file a tax grievance in Suffolk County is mid-May. Thus, in the months leading up to the deadline, Internet volume on keywords for their services increases exponentially. Then, after the filing deadline passes, activity decreases significantly.

Search Engine Optimization: In April 2009, ZapMyTax.com’s previous highest month of traffic activity, they received 209 total organic (unpaid) search engine referrals. A majority of the site’s traffic was being generated by paid advertising sources. While this was profitable, the challenge for 2010 was to increase the site’s organic visibility so that they could generate new customers for free.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising: Since it can take several months for organic search engine visibility to increase after work has been done on a site, we sought to ramp up Pay-Per-Click activity to help capitalize on increasing volume for Zap My Tax’s primary keywords. The goal was to expand the coverage of their ads so that they would appear for all variations of the target service areas, even on those keywords that might not seem intuitively relevant. Additionally, we needed to make sure we did not display our ads outside of Suffolk County, because anyone searching for their keywords outside the target service area wouldn’t be relevant.

The SolutionSearch Engine Optimization: We took the existing site content and enhanced it by creating brand new content pages that target keyword phrases related to Zap My Tax’s various service offerings. While the actual service of grieving taxes is very straightforward, there are many ways in which potential customers search for it. Therefore, it was necessary to research these variations and write effective search engine- and user-friendly copy for each one.

In addition to on-page content optimization, we ran multiple link-building campaigns to increase the number of incoming links pointing to ZapMyTax.com and we worked with Zap My Tax on their social media content strategy to help drive traffic from their accounts on websites like Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Pay-Per-Click Management: First, we built out a campaign structure that incorporated the various search topics users use to find tax grievance services. Then we wrote multiple ad variations to test different messaging. Finally, we geo-targeted the ads to display only to potential customers where Zap My Tax’s services would be applicable. Because some of the keywords being targeted were general terms, an opportunity existed for us to waste a lot of money on irrelevent traffic. Thus, we sought to prevent this.

The ResultsSearch Engine Optimization: In April 2010, ZapMyTax.com’s new highest month of traffic activity, they received 961 total organic (unpaid) search engine referrals, an increase of over 300%. In addition, overall traffic increased by nearly 200% in April. Thus, the site’s organic visibility increased and we were able to capitalize on increased traffic volume because of the enhanced keyword visibility on search engines.

We fully expect that the efforts we undertook for Zap My Tax will yield even higher organic search engine results when their hot season rolls around again in 2011. Zap My Tax will be in a great position to receive search engine referrals on a greater variety of keyword phrases.

Pay-Per-Click Management: By expanding to include multiple variations of the services being offered, we were able to ramp up leads generated by the website. Also, we made sure to include in the paid advertising keywords for which we had high natural search visibility, thereby increasing our first page coverage in Google.

In addition, we expanded the paid advertising to include accounts with Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter. These accounts generated hundreds of new visitors and dozens of new customers who never would have found Zap My Tax simply because they don’t use Google as their primary search engine.

OpenMoves is a full-service Internet marketing agency. We will be featuring a series of case studies showing how we helped Zap My Tax improve not only their SEO and PPC efforts, but also their website, email newsletter and lead generation strategy. Let us help you create a 360-degree, integrated online program so you can increase traffic, sales, and profitability. Stay tuned!

]]>http://openmoves.com/blog/case-study-zap-my-tax/feed/0Improving Pay-Per-Click Conversion Rates for Storefrontshttp://openmoves.com/blog/improving-pay-per-click-conversion-rates-for-storefronts/
http://openmoves.com/blog/improving-pay-per-click-conversion-rates-for-storefronts/#respondFri, 17 Jul 2009 11:23:00 +0000http://www.openmoves.com/blog/?p=213There are so many steps involved in seeing good returns on your paid advertising spend. So, first we’re going to assume you did your homework and you built out a robust campaign in Google AdWords and/or Yahoo Search Marketing, complete …

There are so many steps involved in seeing good returns on your paid advertising spend. So, first we’re going to assume you did your homework and you built out a robust campaign in Google AdWordsand/or Yahoo Search Marketing, complete with targeted keywords, focused text ads, and a cohesive ad group structure. So, now that you are receiving clicks, how can you make sure you’re earning enough revenue to justify your paid advertising budget?

Destination Landing Pages
The page to which your ads click through—does this page either show the product matching the keyword you are using, or does it at least show a listing of products that match the keyword phrase? It is always better to send a user to an internal page of the site, rather than the home page for some of your less general keyword phrases.

More importantly, you want to make sure your destination page has a Call-To-Action—a Buy button, in this case—as well as a Related Item section to promote other, similar items. These are just good, solid, retail techniques to keep a user’s attention on your site. Utilize a sales price where you show the original price crossed out. Potential buyers can easily see the value they’re getting.

Read more about tracking and reading your results…

TrackingThis is such a fundamental element to an effective paid campaign that we must stress the importance of it. Being able to determine which keywords are yielding sales, and the amount of revenue from each sale, are critical to a campaign’s success.

There are two levels of tracking. First, you want to make sure that you implement the Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing PPC Conversion Tracking Code. This code can usually be cut-and-pasted from your account right onto your order confirmation page. Once implemented, the code gives you simple statistics on which keywords are resulting in sales. For obvious reasons, this is very valuable. One way to improve conversion rate is to eliminate poorly-converting keywords.

Secondly, if you are using free Google Analytics (recommended by OpenMoves), you will want to implement Ecommerce Tracking. Such a tool allows your Analytics account to track revenue and sales data. This is extremely valuable because it’ll give you revenue tracking for the entire website—in other words, you will be able to track all revenue sources, not just PPC.

Other analytics packages have similar tracking capabilities, and will require some small level of custom programming to allow you to track revenue. With these capabilities in place, you will be well on your way to maximizing your ROI and improving your conversion rate.

Reading the Results

OK, so now you actually have some valuable campaign data to review. What should you look for?

Here’s a sample of one of our client’s Google Analytics data from the PPC account on Google:

This chart tells us that the source’s conversion rate is 6.57%. The average order value was up over 50%. Similarly, the per visit value more than doubled. Finally, you can see, too, that while PPC accounted for 2.66% of total site visits, it accounted for 6.5% of total revenue. These are all key metrics, and for them to be up so much is very encouraging.

Now, it helps to read behind the data, too. For example, we know we increased the budget by 300%. Thus, it would be hard to imagine not seeing a large revenue increase as a result of this. Still, the results were good, so we know that we are spending the money in the right place.

It is possible to dig much deeper than this. Google Analytics—or indeed any other robust analytics tool—provides revenue by keyword. This extra level of information gives you the knowledge you need to turn keywords on and off and lower or raise bids.

Summary

Building out a robust keyword campaign with myriad keywords and ads is only the first step to a successful—and profitable—paid advertising campaign. You need to make sure you have properly installed tracking to measure sales and revenue. Also, make sure your destination landing page contains all the accepted retail elements to bolster sales. Finally, you need to be able to read and react to the data that has accumulated over the course of your campaign.